Your AI can shop for you. But who pays when it buys the wrong thing?

SALT LAKE CITY — Artificial intelligence can already act as a shopping assistant: Find what you want, compare prices and hunt for deals. And, as the KSL Investigators demonstrated last Christmas time, it can also spend your money on your behalf.

KSL Executive Producer Sloan Schrage and I tested an Amazon AI shopping tool that could watch the price of a product and actually buy it when the price dropped low enough.

"I do find that the AI tools, especially the Amazon ones, are really helpful when you're buying gifts," said Trae Bodge, who was speaking on behalf of Amazon to promote its AI shopping assistant.

"I think people should try these different tools and see which ones appeal to them," Bodge said.

Convenient? Absolutely.

But what happens if your AI buys the wrong thing? Or gets scammed? Who pays then?

Several major banks are sounding an alarm about just that.

Bank of America, Capital One, ING and others say consumers should be mindful about what permissions they give to AI shopping assistants.

Federal rules give consumers ways to challenge unauthorized credit card charges and certain billing errors.

But what if you did authorize the AI to make purchases, and the AI misunderstood you?

Those charges may, indeed, be on you, the banks say.

Before letting a bot loose with your wallet, consider that soon, "I didn't buy that" may come with a follow-up question: Did your AI?

A Visa survey found just 23% of U.S. consumers trust generative AI to handle payments for them.

Visa is already building payment systems specifically for AI agents, with spending limits and approval controls.

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